Ask Lemmy

To quote one of my favorite authors:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

I think new tech is still great, I think the issue is the business around that tech has gotten worse in the past decade

There was a lot of pioneering in the 70's. The first home computers, the first video games, the first mobile phones, all right there in the late 70's. Most people ended the 70's living like they did in the 60's but now there's cool shit like the Speak n' Spell. The average American home in 1979 had no microwave oven, a landline telephone and a TV that might have even been color. There were some nerds who had TRS-80s, some of them even had a modem so they could 300 baud each other. Normies saw none of this.

There was a lot of invention in the 80's. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80's. We emerged from the 80's with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren't that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.

There was a lot of evolution in the 90's. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren't a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system...it's the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user's life. An N64 is exactly what you'd expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it's still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it's the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won't take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven't embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it's not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.

There was a lot of revolution in the 2000's. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It'll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.

There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010's. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don't notice; you buy a new phone and it's so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they've converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren't there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you're probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.

Now we arrive in the 2020's where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010's, it's older than 4 years, but we're days away from the halfway point of the decade and it's becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term "enshittification" because it's got the word shit in it and that's hilarious, but...I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20's represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.

It all went downhill when the expectation of an always-on internet connection became the norm. That gave us:

• "Smart" appliances that have no business being connected to the internet
• "Smart" TVs that turned into billboards we pay to have in our homes
• Subscription everything as a service
• Massive zero-day patches for all manner of software / video games (remember when software companies had to actually release finished/working software? Pepperidge Farm remembers)
• Planned obsolescence and e-waste on steroids where devices only work with a cloud connection to the manufacturer's servers or as long as the manufacturer is in business to keep a required app up to date
• Every piece of software seemingly sucking up all the data it can about you and feeding it back to the mothership so you can be profiled and sold to advertisers
• Pretty much everything Apple does is designed to further lock you into their ecosystem and/or remove a port that's standard in order to pocket the savings and sell you a dongle for $29.99
• Dwindling / disappearing availability of physical media you effectively own forever in favor of digital libraries that you only have a flimsy license to access at the company's whim (even though you "bought" the title for the same price it would have cost on physical media). Those have been ruled non-transferable (e.g. if you want to leave them to someone in your will) and the company going under leaves you with no rights or ability to get a refund or physical copy of things you supposedly bought but can no longer access.

Other than hardware getting more powerful and sometimes less expensive, every recent innovation has been used against us to take away the right to own, repair, and have any control over the tech we supposedly own.

Edits: I keep thinking of more things that annoy me lol.

Tech has definitely become worse since megacorps killed the little guys & sucked the fun out of everything. Open source & self hosting is becoming/has become the only way. So glad I taught myself how to do it

Did they have this tech 10 years ago?

I rest my case

Its called enshitification. Its a process that's been happening in all areas of tech for a while now.

Your BS radar has simply improved I'm guessing. Go through a few hype cycles, and you learn the pattern.

Hardware is better than ever. The default path in software is spammier and more extortionist than ever.

In my opinion as an engineer, methods like the VDI2206, VDI2221 or ISO9000 have done irreparable damage to human creativity. Yes, those methods work to generate profitable products, but by methodizing the creative process you have essentially created an echo chamber of ideas. Even if creativity is strongly encouraged by those methods in the early stages of development, the reality often looks different. A new idea brings new risks, a proven idea often brings calculable profits.
In addition to that, thanks to the chinese, product life cycles have gotten incredibly short, meaning, that to generate a constant revenue stream, a new product must have finished development while the previous one hasn't even reached it's peak potential. As a consequence, new products have only marginal improvements because there is no time for R&D to discover bigger progressive technologies between generations. Furthermore the the previous generation is usually sold along side the next one, therefore a new product can not be so advanced as to make the previous one completely obsolete.

If you really want to see this with your own eyes, get a bunch of old cassette players from the 90s from different manufacturers. If you take them apart you can easily see how different the approaches where to solve similar problems back in the day.

Technology? No.

Consumer Electronics? Yes. Or at least there's a debatable transition and cutoff point.

Not really peaked. More like we entered the era of diminishing returns which btw is great if you are not blinded by the marketing. Mid to low range phones are fairly cheap and more than adequate for almost anything . Do you know how shit even mid range phones were 10+ years ago and how fast they were getting too old to be usable. Right now its more than reasonable to use any smartphone for a 3 to 5 years and probably even longer ( before only champions like samsung Galaxy note 4 could even hope to match that ). Everything you talk about is cheaper and more afforable than ever before( if you do the usual and not buy overpriced brands beacuse of a brand like apple , galaxy phone , roomba robot vacuums etc... ). The only thing thats a shitshow right now are websites and computer prices precisly beacuse right now the current hype is LLM( which makes graphic cards really f expensive and kinda hits website by ricoshet due to the negative LLM influence ).

Actually even as smartphones go there is a progress. Folding phones. Coincidently they are less relaiable and not as long lived . Exatcly as smartphones were 10 years ago.

Also smartphones were something much grander than a simple tech innovation. They were truly a society changing innovation like cars, trains , planes or a computer. They just peaked much faster than cars , trains or planes. In fact they probably had bigger impact on society than computers.

Nah new tech is great. Flippers, steam decks, nano drones. Bluetooth was a joke a decade ago. Now we can do devices over wifi! Much of the tech from that era barely worked and was practically DIY levels of reliability. Rose colored glasses etc..

Which isn't to say that somethings haven't gotten outright shitty (M$, apple products, etc..). But widely, things are much much better. I think it depends how "mainstream" you are shopping. But if you were shopping "mainstream" then, it was just as shitty as it is today.

I feel like smartphones + internet peaked about 10 years ago and has now steadily become enshittified. I have never used "google assistant" because it takes less time to just type something in to my phone or tap the setup for my alarm.

So yes, definitely feel that way. Consumer tech had less bullshit masking as improvements ten years ago.

What? No. lol. Tech is still improving. You're just thinking of the bad new stuff and good old stuff. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Phone's batteries and resolutions are much better than they were in 2014. Voice assistants never really took off. Smart home stuff is maaaaybe a little better now but there are also a shit ton more brands now and most are crap. But that also means cheaper and more widespread.

Feature per dollar possibly yes. Technology itself not necessarily.

The issue is the market was much more competitive 10+ years ago which led to rapid innovation and the need for rivals to keep up.

Today that no longer exists in so many areas so a lot of existing tech has stagnated heavily.

For example, Google Maps was a very solid platform in 2014 bringing in a ton of new navigation features and map generation tech.

Today, the most solid consumer map nav is probably Tesla's map which utilizes Valhalla, a very powerful open source routing engine, that's also used on openstreetmap and OSMAnd.

This is a very huge improvement from 2014 Google Maps.

Except the most used map app is still essentially 2014 Google Maps because Google cornered the market so they no longer have any need to innovate or keep up. In fact it's actually worse since they keep removing or breaking features every update in an attempt to lower their cloud running costs.

You can apply this to a lot of tech markets. Android is so heavily owned by Google, no one can make a true competitor OS. Nintendo no longer needs to add big handheld features because the PSP no longer exists. Smart home devices run like total junk because everyone just plugs it into the same cloud backend to sell hardware. The de facto way to order things online is Amazon. Amazon is capable of shipping within a week, but chooses not to for free shipping to entice you into buying prime, and because they don't have a significant competitor. Every PC sold is still spyware windows because every OEM gets deals with Microsoft to sell their OS package.

Even though the hardware always improves, the final OEM can screw it all up by simply delivering an underwhelming product in a market they basically own, and people will buy because there is no other choice or competition to compare to.

Yes you are correct, it's worse now. At first it was creative, innovative products that made things more convenient or fun, or at least didn't harm its users. Now all the new things are made by immature egotistical billionaire techbros: generative AI which has ruined the internet by polluting it with so much shit you can't get real information any more, not to mention using up all our power and water resources, the enshittification of Web 2.0, Web 3.0 that was pure shit from the get-go, IOT "smart" appliances like TVs, doorbells, thermostats, refrigerators that spy on you and your neighbors, shit "self-driving" killer cars that shouldn't be allowed on the roads, whatever the hell that new VR Metaverse shit is, ads, ads, ads, ads, and on and on. It's a tech dystopia.

I'm roughly the same age as you and I feel the same. In my adolescence and 20s it felt like some new, life-changing gadget was coming out almost every year. Now I feel like there's been incremental changes at best.

I mean I kept the same gaming PC for a decade before building another. The new one runs the exact same games; the only difference is that I can run them at 4K ultra now instead of 1080p medium. Games look better but it's a subtle improvement at best. Not the major leaps in graphical performance I was seeing every 5 years back in the 90s.

Same goes for phones. 10 years ago they were black slabs running Android or iOS, and today they are the same. Very consistent, unlike the constantly evolving and various designs of the 90s and 2000s.

Other than going electric, cars haven't changed much, either. 20-year-old cars that were well-maintained still look new to me, and can be easily modernized with things like aftermarket parking sensors and stereos with Android Auto.

I've been saying this for a while, and have estimated a similar 10-year time frame.

Most new tech (except for medical advancements) doesn't really benefit the average person. Instead, it just gives corporations and governments more data, more control, and the ability to squeeze more money out of us. They don't represent actual improvements to society as a whole or to individual users.

That was when innovation slowed down and rent-seeking increased, once the big players started exploiting their oiligopolies in earnest.

Tech is better, but content is worse. I have a smart TV from 2014 that I'm gonna use until it's dead. When a new technology comes out, it's all about gaining market trust, so the product is built to last and has cool features (generally) without the ads and data theft. My TV doesn't play ads, but still has all the tech I need. Anything it can't do, my PS4 can.

I blame the big tech companies. 10-20 years ago they were not that big so they didn't buy every competition to kill them. Now any time we get a new company or product that could change the world, one of the big 3 (apple, amazon, google) will buy them to keep the tech, code, or people for themselves.

Wanna see what not being bought by big tech is like? Look at what FOSS is doing. Look at Home Assistant, Jellyfin, AOSP is doing, it's making huge leaps without big tech.

You're not crazy. I feel that even when the tech is slightly better the trade offs make the overall deal worse.

More RAM but it's soldered in on laptops. More storage on phones but no micro sd slot. No headphone jacks, the overall obsession with inferior wireless audio. Streaming services suck for anything that is not a live event and I think eventually more people will realize that. Especially as they keep hiking prices. Clearnet internet has been destroyed. The gaming industry is a joke nowadays, charging full price to play betas.

I'm 22 and I feel the same way. 2012-2014 PC hardware was better and I do not care what anyone says. It's probably the software that was better but damn nowadays my 6 core 12 threaded CPU feels so ass in any task compared to my old ass Pentium. I have 32 gigs of RAM and shit can still be slow and unresponsive. Games are poorly optimized because they just focus on making it pretty but it barely looks better. Best example is counter strike 2 vs CS:GO. I played csgo on integrated graphics then on a 1050ti game was always smooth and looked good. Now CS2 looks blurry even with taa off. Runs like shit and sure it looks better but not that much better for it to run how it does.

Edit: another example is vermintide 2. I upgraded my hardware since I played the 1st one but it runs way worse than the 1st one.

I used to customize my desktop like crazy with the dumbest 3D effects. I was on a Pentium using Ubuntu 14.04, integrated graphics. Now I can't run discord and 3D effects without noticing the difference in performance.

Software is getting worse. Because it's getting more and more complex. Now even basic things back then are rough to do now.

I don't have proof or know enough to prove it but I can feel it.

I'm young enough to tell you that it's not just nostalgia. Most new tech now is like "cool but impractical" at best and "I'm worrying about how this will be used to make the world worse" at worst. Nothing to make me think it's the future.

Nah, people always think thing "peaked" during their era. Its probably nostalgia. Tech back then is, in my opinion, terrible.

I was born around 2000-2003 (not giving exact year for privacy reasons)

Examples:

When I got my first phone (like around 2015 or so), it was an android phone that didn't have great encryption. You had to manually enable encryption and its not File-Based encryption like in today's android phones, its Full Disk Encryption which mean alarms dont work if you reboot your phone. And it takes like an hour or 2 to first set up the encryption.

Phones have so much vulnerabilities. Stagefright, Blueborne, etc. Luckily, I never got hacked (or at least not that I'm aware of) but it was just unsettling to know your phone is vulnerable, and you're even already on the latest update. Also there was a lot of screenlock bypasses. Updates typically is only 1 year OS update and 2 year security updates, if even that. Updates were also very slow to get rolled out.

Security was so bad, I can root my android phone with a random app I downloaded by searching "Android Root", don't even need to connect to a pc. Like can you imagine a random app being able to just take root privilages on your phone.

Nowadays, phones are much more secure, even the cheapest samsung phone has 4 years of OS updates, 5 years of security updates. With better encryption.

Phone plans were expensive AF, well I was a kid, but the normal plans had those "Unlimited Data" but with a huge asterisk, data slows after like a certain amount like 5 GB or something, I was unlucky, my parents were a bit cheap so the family plan that I was on only had 30MB of 4g internet, then throttled to 128kbps. Unusable unless you are at home and have wifi.

Nowadays, unlimited plans have become the norm, the plan that I was on even got a free upgrade to unlimited high speed data.

Oh and HTTPS wasn't default in most sites, some didn't even have it. And no HSTS as far as I remember.

Back then, there were no such thing as Airtags or Samsung Smarttags that are so cheap and allows tracking misplace items or even your pets. (I mean there are privacy concerns... still, very useful if not misused)

There were no smart watches that can detect a heart attack. (They're not exactly accurate, but still...)

There were no phones that detect a car crash or even use satelites to make a sos call. (I'm talking about the iPhone 14)

I mean yes we have so much enshittification today, but that's not really a tech problem, its a corporate greed problem not doesn't just affect technology.

Technology isn't bad, its just the way we use it.

Like nuclear technology can be use to build bombs to destroy, or used in power plants to create energy.

Technology is still evolving at break neck speed. On the other hand, companies are degrading/restricting these new techs to make more money.

Design wise, absolutely peaked in the 90s/2000s. Now everything looks like a copy of each other with uninspired designs across the board.

In terms of what it has to offer, I personally don't think so. Couldn't imagine going back 10-20 years ago and not having a device like my Steam Deck that can play computer games on the go (laptop not included since when are you realistically pulling out a laptop on a drive when heading out for errands?) or having a laptop not as thin as my current laptop or even just the touchscreen feature. I also couldn't imagine going back 20 years ago and not having a 1 or 2 TB portable external hard drive (or if they were out, being a lot more expensive than now).

TV resolution peaked about 10 years ago with 1080p. The improvement to 4K and high dynamic range is minor.

3D gaming has plateaued as well. While it may be possible to make better graphics, those graphics don’t make better games.

Computers haven’t improved substantially in that time. The biggest improvement is maybe usb-c?

Solar energy and battery storage have drastically changed in the last 10 years. We are at the infancy of off grid building, micro grid communities, and more. Starlink is pretty life changing for rural dwellers. Hopefully combined with the van life movement there will be more interesting ways to live in the future, besides cities, suburbs, or rural. Covid telework normalization was a big and sudden shift, with lasting impacts.

Maybe the next 10 years will bring cellular data by satellite, and drone deliveries?

In my opinion, technology keeps improving, however that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s getting better. I think innovation in technology peaked from the 2000s to the early 2010s, after this period however, it has continually become more and more “enshitified,” meaning that features no one wanted suddenly being added. For example, “ai coffee maker” (this is real), like who asked for this? Not to mention, not only is everything more bloated, but levels of privacy have decreased significantly; every aspect of your digital life is capitalized on for advertising. The early 2010s were simpler times.

I just had to book a flight.

Frontier forces you to download an app now to check in (there is a well hidden option to do it on web, but the page never loads on laptop nor mobile in multiple browsers).

I tried to rent a parking spot, and 2/4 places would not load quotes at all (again web and mobile and multiple browsers). I probably would've used one of the two that didn't load if their sites had worked. Their loss I guess.

I’d just like it to not feel like each interaction I have with technology, and I guess by extension the world, is becoming increasingly adversarial. The tech itself seems to keep getting better though.

1998. Bang. We needed to stop right effing there!

Tech has advanced technically (for lack of a better word) but yeah, it's being used against us more than to our benefit a lot of the time.